


What We Have Left

by beerecordings



Category: jacksepticeye
Genre: Abuse, Anti controlling the others, Don't copy to another site, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Jackie and Marvin as brothers, Marvin has awesome plant powers because i love that headcanon, Mentions of Death, Possession, Puppets, Seizures, The End, mentions of pet death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-12 13:43:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19133206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beerecordings/pseuds/beerecordings
Summary: Anti's won. He's come to admit it. Anti's won, and Jackie has lost, and lost, and lost, but he hasn't lost everything. Not yet. And he refuses - refuses at any cost - to lose Marvin too. His last little brother is still free and alive, if only barely, and, with everyone else lost to him, Jackie will do whatever it takes to make sure he stays that way."I won't let you die, Marvin."He won't let him die. He'll find a way to end his suffering. There is nothing else that matters.





	1. Fight

There are three things he has left in this world.  
His power.  
His freedom.  
And his Marvin.  
And that's all and that's it, because he failed the others some weeks ago, and since then they have been hiding.  
“Why are we doing this?” Marvin had asked, his eyes too blue and his teeth too sharp. He had stared out at the sky from a crack in a boarded-up house that Jackie had broken into with a crowbar and some pent-up rage. “Why are we running, Jackie?”  
Jackie played with a ball of light in his hands.  
“Meet my eyes,” Marvin demanded.  
Jackie did not. Marvin scowled and sat back, looking away.  
“We should be fighting. We should be saving the others.”  
And Jackie had sighed and vanished the light, and when he met Marvin's eyes he told him without speaking what they both knew to be true – all I can do now is try to keep you safe.  
All he can do is try to keep this last little brother safe.  
So they ran and they hid and they scampered like rats in the darkness, and Anti did not catch them. Anti cannot find them.  
All he has left is his power, his freedom, and a very, very sick little brother, stretched out on the bed of a motel room, dying.

Jackie sits beside his bed, his clenched hands full of light, and he listens to his brother's breathing.  
Fuck, he's exhausted. All he's done for the past two days is rest and look after Marvin, but his brain feels like so much wax and everything is heavy. Groaning, he rubs sleep from his eyes and readjusts on the dirty red carpet of the hotel, flicking a beam of light between each of his fingers intermittently. Pointer, middle, ring, pinkie, pointer, middle, ring...  
All so fucking pointless.  
Stay positive, keep it together, don't cry, he needs you!  
The cars rush by outside in waves of artificial light, and he sits with his knees drawn to his chest, wishing he could go out and be a part of that, a part of anything. All he's done for days is hide. He wishes Chase were here to play games with him, or Henrik to talk to, or Jameson to tussle with. Most of all, he wishes that Marvin would wake up, healthy and unsuffering, whole and painless, safe and free.  
I have to keep hoping. I'm the only one left and I have to keep hoping. I have a lot left yet. I have my power and I'm not Anti's and my little brother is here.  
On his bed, Marvin shivers and turns over, letting out a soft warning gasp that catches in his throat. He gasps again. Shudders. He begins to choke.  
And blood like river-run, hot as fire, dark like a heart, appears at the sickly corners of his eyes, coming drizzling down his face.  
“Shit,” Jackie moans, jumping to his feet, and Marvin, for the fourth time in as many hours, begins to convulse.  
What can Jackie do but hold him through another seizure?

The hero sits beside his bed and listens to him breathing.  
Low and shallow.  
Thin and frail.  
Painful.  
Marvin turns over. Turns to him with a face white as the stomach of an albatross and eye-sockets colored a stunning violet by exhaustion and seizure. Turns to him, helpless.  
Wet salt falls into Jackie's mouth. He reaches out and touches Marvin's face, letting his thumb rub roughly across the fat cut that tears through his cheek.  
“Jackie,” says Marvin, his mouth barely moving.  
“Here,” says Jackie, his voice barely audible.  
“Jackie,” says Marvin. “I don't want to die like this.”  
There are three things that he has left in this world. He has his power. He has his freedom. And he has one single remaining brother. In the darkness, Jackie is cold and afraid, and fury and terror and love all together make his heart pound a dangerous rhythm against the inside of his ribs.  
Marvin sneezes and whimpers, reaching up to rub at his face. For the first time in two days, he slits open his eyes, once as blue as the ocean where the light meets the fish.  
They have both gone black as starlessness.  
Anti's corruption has set in and he's dying very soon.  
“I won't let you,” Jackie promises.  
Determination almost makes him choke.  
“I won't let you die, Marvin.”  
There are three things he has left in this world, but only one of them matters.

The stars are watching for him by the time he decides it's safe enough for him to venture out.  
His motel key card shoved in his jacket pocket, he slips neatly through the rain, boots splashing water across the worm-slicked sidewalk as he makes his way towards help, his hood drawn low over his eyes. He's got no phone, no mask, no allies. It's just him, as it was in the beginning, him alone, but the evil he has to face now is more than the evil he ever had to fight before he was given his brothers.  
And he didn't have anybody to lose back then, anyway.  
He hustles past the shattered windows of dilapidated shops, trying to ignore his reflection. He's found that his own appearance reminds him too much of his friends for him to bear it, so he does not look.  
“Karina!”  
He reaches her door and stands huddled under the hole-riddled canopy outside, crying for her like a bird dropped out of its nest. The rain is warm and he's soaked to the bone with water and petrichor. “Karina, Karina! Hilf mir, Karina, bitte, bitte.”  
The door rattles harshly and he jumps, stepping back. A silhouette has come to stand on the other side, and brown eyes cut through the darkness.  
“Henrik?” she whispers.  
Jackie can almost taste the metal of the gun in her hand.  
“No,” he admits frailly. His thumb soothes against the skin of his wrist. “His brother.”  
The door creaks open another inch. Karina's dark eyes frown towards him. She has a strong face with a shattered nose and a mouth turned in anger. Her eyes are ferocious.  
“I don't know any brother,” she says.  
“We live quietly, if you understand me. We tell nothing to no one. Not even our friends.”  
“I don't help strangers.”  
“Bitte,” he says again, “Bitte, we're twins, see? He was taken from me and I don't know where to go. We have another brother and he's very sick. I don't know where to go. I don't know where to go. He's dying very soon.”  
Karina lingers. Jackie lets his power breathe, just for a moment – pointer, middle, ring, pinkie – and finds that there is light in her.  
“Please,” he says.  
Karina tsks her tongue against her teeth. “Come around the back,” she says. “Bring me no trouble.”  
Jackie hurries around the back, shoving his way past the garbage of the littered alleyway and through the rusting door in the wall. The inside of the makeshift clinic is hardly cleaner, but the wave of iodine smell and the cold lights on the sick bed remind him, at least, of his stolen Henrik.  
“Who took Henrik?” asks Karina coolly, locking the door and coming to stand before him. There's a scalpel shoved in the pocket of her corduroys and a gun abandoned on top of the prescription order on her desk.  
Jackie doesn't know how to explain. “Mob,” he manages finally, biting hard on his lip. He'd give anything for Henrik to be here now. For any of his poor stolen brothers to be here. He'd give anything.  
“Which mob?”  
“Um,” says Jackie, fabricating. “Irish.”  
“I don't want them on my doorstep. Don't you know this is a safe haven? Why are you here?”  
“Sorry, Karina, I think Henrik will have told them everything he knows. You need to leave. They might have been coming after you even before I came.”  
The demon came after Stacy, after all, and that bartender JJ had been so sweet on downtown, and Henrik's other prescription supplier, and Marvin's poor cats, strung up by their little throats from the doorway of the apartment, and everyone, everyone, everyone.  
Everyone he loves, everyone he knows, and now his Marvin, his last brother, his last friend –  
Karina swears once, twice, slamming her clipboard back down on the desk. “Dammit, Henrik,” she says, and then her fury cools and freezes again, and she turns frostily to him. “Tell me about this brother of yours and then let's get out of here. Not my first time running from the mob.”  
Relieved, Jackie tells her everything that could help – that his brother is weak, that his brother is seizing, that he bleeds and fevers, delirious and terrified, that pain makes his whole body limp and his eyes roll back in his head, and even that his eyes have gone black, black, black. He doesn't tell her that flowers shove themselves through the floor of the motel room when Marvin's in distress or that things float when he has nightmares, but everything else is hers. She hushes him when he begins to stammer and ramble, his voice trembling. Even puts a warm, rough hand on his shoulder and pats the side of his neck, turning to her medicine cabinet.  
She's never heard of a sickness quite like that, she says, and Jackie's eyes burn with tears. He doesn't know why. He didn't expect any other answer. It's not Ebola or brain damage or epilepsy or a particularly bad case of the flu. He knew that. It's Anti, and there's nothing he can do. What did he expect her to do?  
“But if he's seizing that often,” Karina says, and then she doesn't finish her sentence.  
Jackie's heart is pumping so hard it hurts all the way up to his throat.  
“I think we better try some anti-convulsants, okay?” she says, reaching for a bottle. “And I'll give you a sedative. Next time it last for more than two minutes, I want you to just knock him out.”  
“Okay,” says Jackie tightly, his mouth trembling. She could tell him to give him rat poison and he probably would if he thought it would keep his Marvin alive.  
“You're sure you can't go to a hospital?”  
“I'm sure.”  
Hospitals have cameras. Hospitals keep records.  
“Well, if... if he gets very very bad...” She hands him epilepsy medication and a sedative with a syringe in the lid, and sighs deeply. “There's enough there to ease his – to make it better. To make it – I'm sorry. Stroke is a painful... there's enough there. There's enough there.”  
His hands are shaking. But he takes what she offers.  
She gives him some aspirin too. Says he looks pale. Says he should eat something. Says, “Did you hear that?”  
Jackie straightens up, eyes wide. Listening.  
There's something moving outside.  
Through the filthy rectangle windows high in the painted cement walls, something is moving, dark and quiet, through the alleyway, coming towards the back door.  
In the front, someone else knocks. “Karina, Karina!” calls a voice just like Jackie's.  
“Fuck,” Jackie hisses, shoving the medicine in his bag and zipping it shut. The ugly fluorescent lamps overhead flicker and buzz in the silence. “Two of them, shit. We need to get the fuck out of here.”  
“Hilf mir, Karina, bitte, bitte!”  
“That sounds like Henrik.” Karina turns to him with wide eyes. “You're sure it's not?”  
“If it is, it isn't,” Jackie answers shortly, because making sense doesn't matter when a demon is using your brothers as bloodhounds to smell you out of your foxhole. He summons a handful of light with one slash of his arm. “Is there another way out of here?”  
She doesn't get a chance to answer before both doors rip open, and darkness fills the clinic like mice fill a snake.  
The only light sits in Jackie's hand. He hears the clicking of a gun. Wonders, idly, which of his brothers will be the one to slaughter him.  
With a shout of alarm, Karina shoves him against the wall, throwing him out of the way as a shot rings out, and then Jackie and Anti are awakened together, and there is chaos.  
Jackie spits the word “light!” like a cry for help and the clinic is illuminated again, too bright now, causing the gunman at the back to fall away and cover his eyes. At the front door, however, Henrik's body does not pause. Seething shadow, he moves forward with more fluidity than the doctor ever had alone, and Jackie sees Anti in the knife in his hand, in the movement of his body, in the hatred in his eyes.  
“My brothers!” Jackie screams, and meets him.  
Anti strikes fast and hard and Jackie barely grabs his wrist out of the air before he can be stabbed, aiming a kick at Henrik's side. Anti doesn't even bother to dodge. He lets Henrik's body take the blow and laughs, throwing his knife to his free hand and swinging again, narrowly missing a slice of Jackie's stomach. Jackie hears the gunman growl and cock the gun again and he throws himself back, watching a bullet bury itself in the wall across the clinic.  
It's dangerous, but he takes a second to look at his second assailant. The gunman is an all-too-familiar figure.  
Agony fills him up like fire and despair. Wailing aloud, he aims a burst of light right for Henrik's eyes, and though it causes Anti no pain, it forces him to stop, blinded. Jackie shoves him away hard and Anti stumbles, falling against the examination table and laughing as Henrik's head cracks back against metal.  
“Five little monkeys jumping on the bed!” sings Anti, blood sliding down the back of his neck as he drags himself back to his feet. “One fell off and bumped his head!”  
Jackie grabs Karina's hand and runs towards the back door, counting on shock to stop Chase from firing in time. Unfortunately, the panic response that's made Chase freeze up like a winter solstice in every other fight he's ever been in seems to have disappeared with Anti's help, and in a moment he has brought his little silver gun up, and he shoots Jackie in the leg.  
Jackie screams and crashes into Chase, shoving them both into the alleyway and collapsing on top of him. Chase yells furiously and drives his elbow up into Jackie's stomach, making him gasp.  
“Jackie called the doctor and the doctor said – ”  
Jackie scrambles to his knees and grabs Chase by the shoulders. He swallows back vomit and he slams his brother's head against the pavement, once, twice, thrice, until his friend goes limp beneath his hands.  
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed!”  
Anti appears in the alleyway and lets his power explode. The darkness hits Jackie like a physical force and throws him to his side, gagging at the tar-taste welling in his mouth. Pain makes it hard to focus. He summons a palmful of light, bursting from his fingers, and he is grateful to get a glimpse of Karina running away, her coat flapping behind her and her feet pounding against the alleyway.  
Anti, however, is a less pretty picture. Standing on the rotting wood of the doorway to the underground clinic, where desperate people have come for the only help in the city for months, Anti laughs. Power courses across his body in red, green, and black glitches, and his eyes are black as pitch. Henrik's face is blood-stained and contorted with hatred.  
“Did your little monkey fall off the bed?” he crows. “Is your kitten dying?”  
“Let my brothers go!” says Jackie.  
He meant for it to come out courageous and determined. It comes out like a wail. It comes out like a scream. His voice is broken. His heart is broken. He sobs it.  
“Let my brothers go, stop it, stop it! Let my brothers go, let Henrik go! Where is my Jameson? What did you do to my Chaser?”  
Every word summons something powerful and desperate within. His blood burns and his body aches as though his bones are trying to bend. He is not afraid for himself. He never has been. But he'll be damned if he lets Anti have his family without a fight.  
Jackie drags himself to his feet, coming to stand in front of Chase's body.  
He is powerful, free, and faithful. That is all. That is all he has left.  
He straightens up for a fight. Overhead, the stars already know how it will end.


	2. Surrender

Marvin barely wakes up to the knocking on the door.  
“Marvin! Marvin, let me in.”  
The words sift groggily through his head. He's up to his eyes in blankets, cocooned against a warm mattress. Pain pounds dully through him. It's difficult to breathe.  
“Marvin, come on, please. It's Jackie, really. I don't want to break the door-handle.”  
“Go away, I don't feel good,” he tries, but his voice comes out smaller than a whisper and twice as pathetic. He shivers and groans, turning his eyes to look at the stars painted on his ceiling.  
Only they're not there. The motel room has a popcorn ceiling. Everything smells like dust and it's very dark.  
Everything that's happening comes crashing down upon Marvin like a wave, but he is too weak to grieve. He decides limply that he would prefer for someone else to be here when he dies, so he must get up and get the door, be it Anti or Jackie awaiting him.  
He crawls most of the way, but he makes it.  
“Marv!” cries a familiar voice as the door swings open and closes again behind his brother. Warm arms wrap around him and Marvin lets himself sink into someone else's strength, humming distantly.  
So when Jackie crumples, they both fall.  
Marvin is too exhausted to yelp, but Jackie nearly screams, biting his lip to blood. Chase's bullet is still in his leg.  
“What's going on?” croaks Marvin, warmly content with delirium.  
“I'm sorry,” Jackie groans, trying to sit them both up. Marvin clings sleepily to him. “I shouldn't have made you get up but the key card fell out of my pocket while I was – um, getting you medicine.”  
“You lost your key card?” Marvin asks. “While Anti's on the prowl?”  
“Yeah,” sighs Jackie, managing to get to his knees. “I let it fall out of my pocket.”  
Silence falls as he drags Marvin back towards his bed. They're both growing dizzy together. Jackie's reminded of the way Marvin always hogs the shower – it's my turn to pass out, Jackie! Give me a few minutes and then you can have your turn, sheesh.  
“That was stupid of you,” Marvin offers up belatedly, and it makes Jackie laugh.  
He's coated in blood and tears. He's shaking like the engine of a car about to overheat. He's hurt.  
But he knows what he has to do.  
His power is gone, exhausted in the fight. Maybe in a few days it will come back, but he never knows. All he has left is his freedom and his Marvin, and he knows what matters, and what he has to do.  
He bandages himself up as best he can. That's the first step. Take care of the emergency. Take care of your brother. Do what you have to do.  
“Let's get some medicine in you,” he says, returning to Marvin's side and reaching into his bag for the anti-convulsants. He limps to the sink to get a cup of water, leaving drops of blood on the dirty mauve carpet. “This is going to make you feel better.”  
“Hmm,” Marvin replies, slitting one skeptical eye open. Jackie tries not to flinch at the blackness. He does not like to flinch at his brother's pain.  
“Don't 'hmm' me,” he tells him sternly, reaching out to brush a long strand of hair from Marvin's eyes and handing him his medicine. “I told you I wouldn't let anything happen to you.”  
“Yes,” Marvin concedes. “Yes, many times. But I'm pretty sick now and that isn't your fault.”  
He takes the pills without glancing at them. He thinks about collapsing back into sleep, but the look in Jackie's eyes has drifted far-away, dull with defeat.  
“You got in a fight, did you?” says Marvin, shivering down on his pillows. “Was it Anti?”  
Jackie stares at him, his mouth frowning softly. “Yes,” he admits.  
No point in lying to Marvin. He always knows better.  
“Just Anti?”  
“And – and – he was wearing – my Henrik. My Chase.”  
Marvin hums, closing his eyes as a dull pain starts up in his head. Grief rows over him, but he's getting used to the ebb and flow of this sorrow for his stolen brothers. Soon, his exhaustion will overwhelm him, so he needs to think straight while he can.  
“He didn't want you dead, then,” says Marvin. “What did he want?”  
“How do you know he didn't want me dead?”  
Marvin shrugs. Pushes down a pain in his chest. Pain doesn't matter anymore. Jackie's all that matters.  
“If he did, he would have brought the little traveler, not Chase and Henrik. And you would be dead, because Anti and Jameson could make bone shavings of you on your best day.”  
Jackie doesn't meet his eyes. He's crying. His face tells nothing.  
“You think Jaimer would kill me?”  
“With Anti in his head, yes. But that's not the point. What did Anti want?”  
Jackie bites his lip, hard.  
“Did he try to make you a deal?”  
“What,” spits Jackie. “Would he possibly want to deal with? He has everything. He has everything he wants. No, he didn't make me a deal. I think it's called an ultimatum.”  
Jackie regrets the words as soon as they're out of his mouth. Marvin is as cold as the bottom of a river, as grey as fog; his black eyes are shut, but he listens.  
“Sorry,” Jackie whispers, reaching forward to brush his hair out of his eyes. “I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said anything. Go back to sleep, Marvel.”  
“What answer did you give him?” asks Marvin. His fatigue is heavy enough to be painful. “To the ultimatum, what answer?”  
Jackie sighs, rubbing his face. “No answer,” he says. “No answer, buddy.”  
It's the truth. But Jackie has an answer planned. If the anti-convulsants don't work, there is no other option left. No other way. No one who can help. Nothing to turn to. He knows what matters. He knows what he has to do.  
“Hey,” he says, nonchalantly. “Where's your mask? I want to put it in my bag, make sure we don't lose it.”  
Marvin points wearily to the drawer. Jackie tucks his mask in his backpack.  
If the anti-convulsants don't work, he knows what he has to do.

Marvin has another fit, and then another, and then another, til the night has passed in an agony.  
“Do you remember that time Chase burned the donuts he was making?” Jackie whispers.  
“And then he powdered them anyway,” Marvin whispers back.  
“And Henrik picked up a big one and bit into it and the dough was completely back.”  
“Oh, he looked so fucking betrayed. Just raw grief in his eyes. So betrayed.”  
They laugh together. Marvin's breathing has begun to sound like wind through the bulrushes. Agony registers in every inch of his flesh.  
“Do you remember the time you let Henrik borrow your computer?” asks Marvin. “Chase had been hacking in and messing with your settings for months, but you didn't think he'd do anything.”  
“Yeah, and then he somehow made it so the screen was upside down and it took me like two weeks to fix? I should have pounded him for that.”  
“You wouldn't hit somebody who can't fight for shit.”  
Laughter again. It taints the taste of death in the air. When did Jackie start crying?  
“He couldn't fight for shit, could he?” he laughs, wiping salt from his cheeks.  
“No – oh, but do you remember Jameson? You told him you were going to give him a self-defense class...”  
“Then he punched me in the stomach, flipped me over his hip, and nearly broke my neck in the first few seconds.”  
“Chase and Henrik laughed so hard.”  
“And so did you!”  
“No way, I came right to your aid!”  
“While laughing like a maniac!”  
“I was the only one who helped you,” laughs Marvin. “That's cause I'm a good little brother. I have never done anything wrong in my life, ever.”  
Jackie runs a hand through his overgrown hair. Marvin's spread across his lap, panting, open-mouthed, as he begins to die.  
“You are a good little brother,” he whispers.  
“You're supposed to say, 'I know this, and I love you,'” Marvin protests weakly, smiling, coughing.  
Fuck, he'll be sorry to leave him. Fuck, he'll be so goddamn sorry to leave him.  
“I know this,” says Jackie. “And I love you.”  
Marvin smiles. Closes his eyes.  
“I should thank you,” Jackie says. “For all the times you've been a good little brother to me.”  
Usually Marvin brushes this sort of mood off. Tells him not to sappy on him, makes a joke, adds that he loves him, and then tries to distract him and cheer him up. Tonight, he just stares up at his brother.  
“You were always good to me. Even when we were fighting. You were always good to me. I'm the flame of a lighter and you're the mirror that magnified what little goodness I ever had in me. Sorry, I know you don't like to hear me say that. I am good, I know that now. It makes me proud, to be free, and to choose to be good. You kind of bullied me into loving myself. You're a motherfucker like that.”  
Marvin's smiling. Jackie loves him so hard it hurts to breathe.  
“So thank you,” he finishes, choking.  
“Thank you,” Marvin whispers back. “For everything, Jackie.”  
His mouth is a little blue. There isn't much time.  
“Jackie,” says Marvin.  
“Here,” says Jackie.  
“This hurts.”  
“I'm sorry, buddy. I'm so fucking sorry.”  
“Can we look at pictures for a while? I have pictures on my phone. JJ and Chase and Henrik and us. Can we look at pictures?”  
“I'm sorry, buddy. We had to get rid of the phones, remember? I don't have any pictures.”  
“Oh,” says Marvin.  
They sit together for a long time. Pain is making him shake.  
“I would have liked to see them one last time,” says Marvin.  
Pain is making them both shake.  
“I'm going to give you something to help you to sleep, okay, Marvel?”  
“Okay, Jackie. First, though, listen – listen. I'm proud of you.”  
“What for, bud?”  
Marvin looks up at him. His eyes are black. His eyes are loving.  
“For letting me go,” he says. And then, soft, “Promise me you'll try to be happy?”  
Jackie breaks down.  
Jackie sobs.  
Sobs.  
Sobs.  
Those words are the last ones Marvin manages to get out for the time being.  
But Jackie will not let him die.  
“I promise,” he says.  
Reader, he lies.  
He lies.  
Jackie does not plan to be happy.  
And he does not give Marvin the full dose of the sedative.  
He gives him only enough to make him sleep.  
Just enough that, when Jackie leaves, Marvin can't tell. He's deeply asleep. He believes that he's about to die, but it isn't frightening, because he thinks that Jackie is still holding him.  
But he is alone.  
He is alone.  
Jackie goes.

“Hi, Chaser,” he says, thirty minutes later.  
The red laser point of a sniper sits in the middle of his chest.  
Jackie stands in the door of a decrepit old building on the far outskirts of town. The house stinks of blood, strong enough to make breathing difficult. The wood is rotting and the wind blows through the walls like sand through open fingers. Jackie takes a step forward and mouse bones crunch beneath his boot.  
He hears a gun click above his head.  
“Come on, little bro,” he says. “Come down from the rafters. This place is falling apart and you're going to get hurt.”  
“What are you doing here?” snaps Chase, angrier than Jackie's ever heard him. His voice shakes and seethes. Jackie thinks he sees the flash of his blue eyes in the shadows.  
“Anti told me to come,” Jackie answers. “Come down and see me. I've missed you.”  
“You were stupid to come here. Anti's going to kill you. I'm going to kill you. I'll kill you and he'll wear your corpse like a skinned animal. How does that sound? You were stupid to come here.”  
Chase slips down from the rafters, throwing his rifle over his shoulder and clutching the pistol at his side instead.  
“How's your head?” asks Jackie.  
“How's your knee?” Chase sneers, stepping into the light, and Jackie can finally get a good look at him.  
“Poor Chaser,” he whispers. “I'm so fucking sorry.”  
There's still blood clinging to the back of his matted, wild hair. He's been struck since they last saw each other – his cheek is split open in a burst of purple and red, and pain makes his eyes desperate, his pupils blown wide and his gaze flickering anxiously across the room. His hands, however, are steady, and they cling intermittently to different guns and knives strapped across his body.  
His mouth is full of hatred. His eyes are full of hatred. Anti has taught him hatred.  
“Don't look at me like that!” Chase says.  
He screams it, actually. Saliva flies from his mouth. He staggers, readjusts, lifts up his gun. “Like you pity me! You're the one who's ruined, Jackie. Anti should have killed you earlier when he had you. You're the one who – ”  
“Dammit, Chase, spare me the goddamn speech and take me to the king bitch, alright? I don't have time for your sycophancy. Snap out of it, man, there's still time for you to get away!”  
For a second, the hatred is gone, and there is nothing but agony in Chase's eyes.  
“No,” he says wearily, his gun pointed at his old friend's chest. “There isn't.”  
Jackie sighs. The sun is rising, but very little light can get inside this cold and rotting house.  
“Take me to Anti, Chase.”  
He's marched at gunpoint through the house, so he doesn't even get to look at Chase. They move through a hallway. Down the stairs. Past a little room with no door and chains inside.  
“Jackie?” comes a soft voice, and when he turns his head, there is his Henrik, gripping weakly at the opening where a door should be.  
“Schneep!” cries Jackie, and his voice cracks, because while Chase has a feverish sort of conviction, Henrik is white with shock, his expression blank and numb. Anti is no longer possessing him, but he doesn't look any better off.  
“No,” says the doctor, his voice flat, his eyes dead. “No, not you too.”  
“Henrik,” Jackie moans. He tries to move towards his little brother, but Chase barks a warning cry and draws back the rifle to strike him. Jackie retreats, continuing on his march.  
“Henrik,” he calls, turning his head back to look at him. “Come here, come walk with me. I want to see you. I've missed you.”  
But Henrik stands unmoving in the doorway, his mouth blue. There is blood down the back of his head and throat. He is a ghost in most senses of the word.  
Jackie grits his teeth. “Can I see JJ first, before Anti?” he asks, holding back a sob. “Please?”  
Chase laughs, a cold noise.  
“Don't worry,” he says, and his voice is green. “The little brat never leaves Anti's side.”  
“Little brat?” Jackie repeats, bewildered. “Once, when he was four weeks old, you told him you loved him so much that you'd – ”  
Chase grabs his hair and yanks his head back so hard Jackie screams. Grinning, Chase steps forward and sets his mouth at the base of Jackie's ear, so his lips move against his flesh.  
“You really don't get it, do you?” he hisses. “We were wrong, Jackie. We were wrong – to live like that. To think you could ever lead us. To think you could save us. No. Anti is the answer. Anti is the answer. It's so much better like this! Oh, you don't know, it's so much better like this.”  
Jackie is crying. Chase is smiling. Chase is bleeding.  
“You'll understand soon,” he says, releasing Jackie's hair. He smooths it back into place and touches Jackie's cheek. For a second, he looks kind again. “You will, okay? It's all going to be better in a second.”  
“I love you,” Jackie says.  
He is about to lose himself and he needed to say it again before he goes.  
Chase sighs, pushing him forward. “Anti's in there. Go. Try anything and I'll put a bullet in your spine, so it hurts to die, okay? I love you too. Go on.”  
There are two things he has left in this world.  
His freedom and his brother. The others are lost to him. His freedom and his brother.  
There are two things he has left in this world.  
And he knows what matters.  
“I'm here,” he calls, and enters.

Anti is enthroned.  
The white concrete of his basement room is zig-zagged, wall and ceiling, with splattered trails of bright red paint. There are no windows. Often this is where he brings the corpses, to gloat over his most recent kill – though, increasingly, he allows JJ to do the killing for him.  
He knows Jackie will come.  
At the end of the fight, they both staggered onto opposite sides of the alleyway and crumpled against the wall, panting and wild, ferocious with hatred and a desire to protect the brothers they called their own. The temptation, for Anti, had been to slaughter him and tie his flesh into ribbons, but victory has made him more patient, more far-seeing, and he wants Jackie to be his.  
He wants the full set.  
But he's made Marvin very sick and he can't find him. He's willing to have just one, and let the other live, rather than let them both die, and so he told Jackie where to go if he wanted his last little brother to survive.  
And he knows he will come, because he knows what matters to Jackie.  
Now he stands in the doorway.  
“You're pathetic,” says Anti, by way of greeting.  
His body is mostly translucent and he glitches in different colors, sitting black-eyed one moment and flickering into different positions. There is a large hunter's knife clutched in his hand. Jackie, however is looking at Jameson.  
The boy sits beside him, his bowtie tied too tightly around his throat. He is neat and dapper and smiling very brightly, his eyes closed and his chin set on Anti's knees. Blood coats his whole throat and there are bandages swaddled around his wrists and ankles.  
Anti reaches down to massage the back of his head, rubbing his fingers through his thick downy hair. JJ heaves a sigh of content, looking up at him with over-bright eyes.  
“He's a good little dog, isn't he?” says Anti. “You'll be a good little dog too.”  
Revulsion crawls up Jackie's body like a herd of harvestmen. He stands tall anyway. He wants to exercise his dignity in the last few minutes it's his to use.  
“Leave him alone,” he says, softly.  
“Shut the fuck up,” says Anti, and Jameson throws his head back and laughs.  
“You want me to save your cat?” Anti continues, shoving Jameson's head away and sitting up straight.  
“Yes,” Jackie rasps.  
“Your freedom for his life.”  
“Yes.”  
Jackie blinks and Anti is standing in front of him, no longer splayed across his chair but standing, head tilted, and staring at him, a cold smile on his mouth.  
“You have to understand what's going to happen to you,” he says. “I want your full acceptance. It makes it so much easier. I'm going to make you my little bitch. You're going to worship me like a god. You'll want to kill your brothers so no one else can have my attention. I will use your hands for bloodshed and you will thank me.”  
Jackie bites back on a curse and swallows tears. It takes him a long time to say “fine.”  
“We don't have time for this,” he adds weakly. “Please save my brother.”  
Anti reaches out and puts his hand on Jackie's cheek, who jolts like he's been shot.  
“Don't flinch from me,” orders Anti coolly.  
He stares Jackie in the eyes.  
It's strange, the way that power feels.  
Like sinking.  
For a second, Jackie lets himself drown in the blackness of Anti's eyes – for a second, he savors the feeling of the demon running his thumb over his lips, the sensation of someone else glancing at his thoughts and knowing them bare, the taste of surrender – but then he remembers himself, and he screams and jerks his head back, panting.  
Jameson has risen to his feet, a silver knife against his palms and a dangerous stance to his body. Anti, for his part, watches. He glitches wildly, his form going dark at the edges. His hands are held behind his back.  
“You have to give in to it,” says Anti, in a voice that whispers to Jackie from all sides.  
“You haven't saved Marvin yet,” Jackie cries.  
Anti pulls himself back together, growing more solid and breathing in deep, the sigh of a snake.  
“Give me the mask,” he says.  
Shaking, Jackie pulls Marvin's mask from his bag. There is a deep gash in it, where Anti had cut into Marvin's cheek in the middle of their flight some weeks ago. That was when Marvin's corruption began. That was when his eyes turned black.  
Anti holds it in his hands, and hatred boils hot in Jackie's stomach, but he has to trust that the glitch will keep his side of the deal.  
Anti closes his eyes.  
Beginning at the cut, the white turns to black, and the patterns of the mask are swallowed away. The mask remains intact, but Jackie doesn't know if it wouldn't be better if it would be better to destroy it than to leave it like that.  
“Is he safe?” Jackie whispers.  
Anti shivers as the power he had poisoned Marvin with returns to him. For a moment, his veins are black. “He's safe,” he promises.  
“And you'll leave him that way,” Jackie demands. “You will. I don't want you to ever see him again.”  
“I will not seek him out. For a year, I will not allow him to find us, either. But if he continues to search for you after that, I will put an end to his irritation. How does that sound, Red?”  
Jackie's mouth is dry. He is shaking so hard he cannot stand up straight. “Sounds good,” he whispers. “Promise me you'll keep it.”  
Anti stares at him.  
“Gealltanas,” he says, and means it.  
Jackie closes his eyes, just for a moment. When he opens them again, he pauses to look.  
Henrik and Chase have come to stand in the doorway, watching him cautious curiosity. Jameson has settled back down beside Anti's throne, chewing on the ends of his nails. Jackie looks at them. He's glad to see them.  
“Okay,” says Jackie. “Okay.”  
“Now beg for me.”  
“What?”  
“Beg for me.”  
And power fills him up like sun fills a crystal, but the power is not his, and the power is darkness, not light, and fuck, it burns, it burns, it burns.  
Jackie screams and stumbles backwards, reaching up to clutch at his chest, and Anti backhands him so savagely his head slams into the wall with a faint smear of blood on the concrete. Jackie crashes to the ground and curls, curls, curls in on himself, destroyed by the incredible pain splitting through his head. A low, desperate moan falls out of his mouth.  
And for a second – for a second that makes them all shudder – Henrik is angry, and Chase is protective, and Jameson is upset.  
Henrik starts, gasping, and he reaches out, just once, as if to grab Anti's shoulder, but he does not grab it. Chase flinches and touches the handle of his gun, but he does not shoot. And the youngest – Jameson Jackson, the traveler, the planet-turner – touches the little brass clock in his pocket.  
He could turn it all back.  
He could turn all this back.  
Turn back time, flip back the pages, undo the ending, undo the pain.  
But he is too far gone, and his thoughts, and his freedom, and his power belong to Anti.  
He returns the clock to his pocket.  
“Beg for me,” Anti repeats, grabbing Jackie's wrist and squeezing until crescent blood blooms beneath his nails. “Beg for me.”  
There is so much hatred in his eyes that every light, radio, phone, and computer within a thirty mile radius glitches and powers down. Chase, Henrik, and JJ, as one, make the wise choice to flee the room.   
“Anti,” begs Jackie. “Anti.”  
“Beg for me,” says Anti, falling to his knees beside him and shoving Jackie against the wall, holding him by his throat.  
“Please,” says Jackie. Something warm rises in his head.  
“Beg for me, beg for me.”  
Anti's power reaches out and the whole room shudders with darkness, shadows growing thick and excited between the cement walls.  
Jackie chokes, wails, cries out in despair. Confusion fills his head thickly and he grows dizzier and dizzier with each second that passes. Dragging his eyes open, he looks up, and sees only darkness.  
And the darkness is beautiful and it calls his name.  
“Make me yours,” he whimpers.  
Anti reaches out to touch his cheek, and no one has ever touched him more wonderfully. Something in him cries for him to jerk back and fight, but another part says Marvin's name, just once, and Jackie lets the hand stay.  
And Jackie sinks and sinks and sinks.  
For hours, Anti sits with him, whispering, touching, until, by the end of it, Jackie's pupils are blown wide, and he kneels beside Anti's throne, and rejoices to have his hair stroked and to hear the words: “You're a good little puppet, aren't you, mo deartháir?”  
Jackie breathes in deep, closing his eyes.  
“Yes,” he says.  
He whispers. He prays.  
“Yes, I'm a good puppet.”  
His power is Anti's. His freedom is gone.  
But Marvin?  
Marvin remains.  
His Marvin remains.

Karina moves down the street, straight-backed and quick-paced, her powerful face glaring at the sun. Around her, crowds part like Moses's sea. Her face is set like a steel trap and her eyes scowl, and so no one troubles or interrupts her on her way.  
In her heart, she is afraid.  
She's always known that Henrik, like so many of the other people who come to her for help, was caught up in something bigger than himself. He jolted too hard at loud noises, showed up to exchanges covered in bruises and cuts, disappeared for months on end, and made no mention of any family. She had assumed he was an illegal immigrant, running from something dangerous back home, alone and traumatized in an unfamiliar country.  
He was quite mean, snappish and sarcastic. She was quite mean right back, biting and cold. Often they parted with an “I hate you,” and a “Yes, I hate you as well, bye.”  
They were close friends.  
Her instincts tell her to run. It's what she's best at and it's served her well in her life. When the mob is closing in, and a stranger shows up at your door complaining that his brother has black eyes, and gold light drips like something from another world through the hands of a man who looks just like someone she thought she knew – well, that's when it's time to go, and find a safer place to live.  
But here she is.  
Tracking down the twin with the light in his hands, unsure if he or Henrik or the sick third one are even alive.  
She holds the key card that fell from Jackie's pocket in her hand. At the run-down motel where he must have stayed, curtains contain bleary and exhausted truths, and cigarette smoke curls from the nearest corner like a foul Easter incense. Karina breathes in deep and begins her search, holding the key card up to the sensor on every door, one by one. She doesn't bother knocking. Families don't open the door to knocking when they're on the run.  
In the end, she finds the room not through the card, but through the flowers.  
At the door to Marvin's room, dandelions and forget-me-nots are panting up through the concrete, clutching desperately at the pavement and crawling, determined, up the walls. Karina stops short, amazed.  
Inside the room, a cry.  
Gripping the handle, she holds up the key card and then shoves, tearing the door free of the heavy plant life and forcing her way inside, where the carpet has been torn apart by plants of all kinds and vines wrap their way up to the white ceiling. Around her heels, thin blue wisps of something soft and dangerous through the air, smelling of smoke and lily, charged like the atmosphere before a storm. The bed is floating and the closet is upside down.  
In the middle of it all, Marvin stands like a broken thing.  
It’s been three hours since he fell asleep in Jackie’s arms, and everything has changed. He shakes, torn apart by exhaustion and distress. Clenching his teeth tight together, he grips at his hair, blue magic seething, uncontrollable, from his eyes and hands.  
“Hello?” cries Karina, almost moved to terror, almost moved to awe.  
He turns wildly to her, confused and distraught, but she is not his brother, and he staggers back with an expression in his eyes somewhere between grief and denial. “Who are you?” he chokes, and his voice, layered with power, echoes like thunder through her head.  
“I just,” she gasps. “I just wanted – I just wanted to find Henrik!”  
“Henrik,” answers Marvin, and for a second the magic coalesces into a man, and Henrik stands before her once again, his features painted in translucent blue. Then Marvin shakes his head, crying, and his brother falls apart again.  
“Gone,” he tells her, sinking to the ground, and he begins to weep, to sob, to scream as a rabbit screams. Flowers bloom around his knees, coating him in dragon hibiscus and night cereus. He is beautiful and wild and lost and despairing. He was supposed to be the one to die. He was supposed to be the one to die. This isn't what he wanted. This is the last thing, the last thing, the last thing in all the universe that he wanted. “Gone. Gone, my family... Jackie, Henrik. JJ, Chase. Sean. They're all... everything... everyone... gone.”  
He turns to her. His eyes are blue. The sky is cloudy and the sun is gone.  
“I have nothing left,” he says. “I have nothing.”  
After that, he does not speak again. Cannot get the words out. Karina understands.  
There is nothing left to say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, thanks so much for reading, dude. Let me know if you liked it! You can find me and a lot more of my writing on tumblr at the same username. I'm considering a sequel to this story... is there anything you'd like to see more of in this world?


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